11/04/2008 @ 9:30AM

The Voter

For Americans to feel a little wistful on Election Day is nothing new. About 125 years ago, the philosopher William Graham Sumner wrote about the lost citizen, that man “for whom there is no provision in the great scramble and the big divide.” Sumner determined that the progressive project was well and good but it also “forgot” someone, the voter who subsidizes that project. Sumner’s profile of The Forgotten Man: “He works, he votes, generally he prays, but he always pays. All the burdens fall on him, or her.” As Sumner pointed out, in the political process the forgotten man is “never thought of.”

Today at least one candidate is evoking Roosevelt. Roosevelt spoke of a different forgotten man, the man at the “bottom of the economic pyramid.” At the time people thought FDR was thinking of the ragtag vet of the Bonus Army, which marched on Washington in the early years of the Depression to ask Washington for help surviving. Some may remember the song in the glitzy “Gold Diggers of 1933″: “Remember my forgotten man, you put a rifle in his hand.”

In reality Roosevelt vetoed a bill for the Bonus marchers, just as Coolidge once had. What Roosevelt was doing was using the unemployed man as an occasion to establish modern constituency groups. Henceforward Democratic politics was to be about rewarding such groups seriatim. FDR gave the senior citizens Social Security, the union workers got the Wagner Act and the American Indian tribes got territory under FDR’s Indian Reorganization.

FDR also, at least sometimes, saw blacks as such a group. In the windup to one of his presidential elections, 1936, FDR announced New Deal support for blacks at Howard University, asserting that there were no “forgotten races.” Even the spurned soldiers as a group eventually got targeted gifts from Roosevelt. The G.I. bill, which he signed in 1944 was a world more generous than legislation for veterans that he had vetoed before. And always, the man who didn’t happen to fall in one of those favored classes was left in the dark. The whole modern conservative movement is based on that event–think of Albert Nock’s Memoirs of a Superfluous Man.

One reason Senator Obama has as good a shot at the presidency as he does today is that he recalls not only FDR’s forgotten man, but also Sumner’s. Senator Obama is identified as being part of at least two powerful constituent groups–blacks and lawyers. The lawyers probably pack more punch in Washington.

But it is the black group question that is resonating with voters. Blacks, either as groups or individuals, have so often been forgotten in our past–think of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1964). But because Obama was born to a white mother and a black father, he is also of no group. A few years ago another man of mixed background published a wonderful book called The Color of Water. (That man, James McBride, is now campaigning for Obama.) For many voters Obama is the color of water. One reason Obama reduced Jesse Jackson to whispering obscenity into a hot microphone is that Jackson saw that many Americans preferred an individual person who is, almost incidentally, black, to a professional identity group representative like Rev. Jackson.

McCain, however, also recalls various forgotten types. In solitary at the camp on the outskirts of Hanoi, the officer really was like a forgotten man; as a veteran he recalled both Bonus Army marchers and the postwar G.I. In his campaign against waste in Washington, McCain represents the forgotten individual who must pay for that waste. In his promise to do anything to halt spending, McCain is promising to battle for the forgotten man. The case McCain makes against Obama is essentially that Obama will disregard the taxpayer in his haste to serve the modern Rooseveltian groups.

But the problem is more subtle. McCain may want to stop the spending to help the forgotten man, but people aren’t sure he will be able to. As president, he might help the GOP’s own constituent groups (“drill, drill, drill” big energy) and leave others out. Obama also confronts a challenge. He himself may instinctively be a classical liberal. The Congress that may well be swept in with him is a modern liberal, a progressive. Lawmakers owe their groups. At the unions’ behest, Democrats are promising to make it harder for workers to be the anonymous man by depriving them of their anonymity in votes on unionization (“card check”).

Democrats are also planning those large increases on the taxpayer that will make of the professional class a new forgotten man. Under the daunting pressure of Senator Harry Reid and Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the less-experienced senator from Illinois may well indeed become what Senator McCain has so sneeringly called him: “redistributor in chief.” If he does, he will create more forgotten men than any president in half a century.